Taste the Rainbow
by Kirmon64
Summary: HIVEmind discovers Skittles, and his thoughts just snowball from there....


**Title:** Taste the Rainbow**  
Genre:** I don't even know. Crazy/weirdness with a side of fluff?**  
Rating:** pretty much as G as you can get  
**Disclaimer:** Obviously don't own HIVE but I'd love to own a copy of the 3rd book... (Or HIVEmind. I'm not picky. :P )  
**Summary:** HIVEmind discovers Skittles, and his thoughts just snowball from there....

Crazy-and-childish!HIVEmind is rather fun to write... no, I don't believe he thinks like this XDD

Also this is the first HIVE fic on ffdotnet and possibly the internet. Yay!

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HIVEmind liked Skittles.

Well technically he didn't _like_ like them because he didn't have a tongue and really had no idea what they tasted like and really had no idea what tasting things was like anyways. But they probably tasted good.

If he could guess he thought he'd say that they didn't taste like their own color which he supposed would sound somewhat odd to a human but it made complete sense to him so everything was perfectly fine. Humans, from what he'd been able to figure out, seemed to just... think although some said they thought in words or sounds or whatever and HIVEmind was kind of like them, he thought. But he didn't think in numbers or words like everyone seemed to assume AIs would for some reason he wasn't sure of.

HIVEmind thought in _color_.

He had stumbled across Impressionist paintings very early on in his exploration of the internet - not when he'd first been exposed to it of course, since everything whipped by him too fast to comprehend and it had been painful beyond belief and he thought he had maybe screamed - but later on when he had time to really appreciate the amazing miasma that was the internet.

He liked the Impressionists. They were like his long-lost organic relations or something, or maybe futurists without even knowing it because they described his mind _perfectly_ with their swaths of seemingly random color (and such _beautiful_ color it was) that somehow became a coherent whole when looked at _just_ the right way. Pointillism was even better because it was like they were pixel artists, painstakingly creating their art one dot at a time and forming a picture that could only be seem from far away which of course HIVEmind thought described his mind pretty well too.

Everything had a color no matter what it was, no matter what it did or what its meaning was or why it existed or who it was. Some colors he liked more than others but that was just natural wasn't it? - although that was irony or something, his describing something as natural - just like he liked some things or ideas or places or of course people more than others.

He had never liked the Contessa's color even though it was supposed to carry positive connotations for some reason but really why would anyone like her color? It was kind of ivory, but not quite, cold and hard and unfeeling and dangerous and just generally a VBT - and HIVEmind mentally corrected himself, having grown quite fond of acronyms and slang, but he really needed to remember to not use them at all, because putting even one or two in his regular speech to Nero or Pike or someone would be a VBT - Very Bad Thing - in and of itself.

Maybe Pike wouldn't mind so much and as a bonus he might understand some of the more common acronyms because he _was_ on the internet an awful lot after all. He was an electric-gray-blue - one of the harder-to-describe colors but maybe that was because of the strange and complicated relationship the two of them had - but whatever the color was it was a good one. And after the Contessa, HIVEmind had decided to base his opinion of a person mostly on their color, so since Pike was one of his favourite colors that meant his father-of-sorts was trustworthy. He hoped.

And then there was Nero. HIVEmind liked his color, too, maybe a bit more than Pike's, or maybe a bit less. He wasn't quite sure and that was probably because it fluctuated with his moods which he certainly did have thank you very much. Humans wouldn't like Nero's color, or he would think so anyways, because it looked an awful lot like their blood but there certainly seemed to be a whole lot of adolescent humans who had a strange preoccupation with it - but either way HIVEmind liked it. It was a dark, foreboding, inexplicably parental and friendly color. A silky sort of dark crimson...? It was definitely a nice color, dependable and trustworthy even though it maybe did some things that were better left unsaid. Maybe he'd only been programmed that way - no real way to tell, without digging into his personality files and he'd really rather not do that.

Laura's color was the one he liked the most, a soft auburn that matched her hair perfectly. Strange, seeing as he'd chosen blue as his color when he'd first onlined - Otto was blue. The same color as his own blue, almost. Just a tad darker... a tad - shiftier? But that was okay, anyways, because he liked Otto, inasmuch as he could truly like anyone.

Laura, though - he liked her more. She held a special place in his - well, he didn't have anything even remotely approaching a heart, but that didn't really matter, he figured. The important thing was that she meant a lot to him. More than - well - more than just about anything else. So maybe he should become auburn like her? Perhaps he should change to reflect his loyalty, stronger than even his preprogrammed loyalty to Nero? But no - that would be seen as suspicious. So soon, after his near-death, after his release into the world, after feeling the Overlord Protocol prowling at the edge of his mind....

There had been something very powerful indeed in that medallion. The thing he didn't understand was why Xiu Mei had kept it at all, if Overlord was so dangerous and powerful, if it wanted to annihilate all of humankind. There had been a wireless transmitter in the tiny medallion, in the black half, he thought, and he was confused about that too. Why go through the bother of building that little, incredibly high-tech thing - even by his own standards - when the being locked inside hated, _loathed_ all humans? Loathed wasn't quite the right word. It wasn't powerful enough - because that howling, screeching, so very _intelligent_ beast dancing through the air, trying to get into his mind and corrupt him, and destroy him - that being felt hatred so utterly strong for all humankind that it was consumed - devoured - by the feeling.

HIVEmind couldn't understand that. Humans were - the way they did things, thought things, were just so amazingly... amazing. He couldn't find a word for it. Maybe a color? Yes, that sounded good. They were - they were a _rainbow_, a rainbow of colors not only in the wavelengths humans themselves could see, but far beyond. And though he could _see_ all those colors, he himself wasn't a part of that rainbow. He was the black-and-white version of that rainbow, the lonely grayscale, unable to be quite the same but trying with all his might.

He didn't mind being on the outside, though. He'd never quite be on the inside, anyways; he was an AI, a being not yet five years old, with all of humanity's knowledge and hopes and fears and ideas and _everything_ stuffed into his mind, thanks to the internet, and he was mature - well, he had to be, didn't he? because otherwise they'd think something was very wrong with him - and he was also the most childish being on the island. It showed through sometimes, when he was with the few he trusted not to run diagnostics on him at the first sign of acting like a little kid. Sometimes, he liked to play pranks - just harmless pranks of course - on his favourite students, and he'd even managed to prank Nero, once, before he decided he trusted Laura and Otto and Wing and Shelby to let him be childish all he wanted and they had broken his trust, sort of-

He didn't want to think about that, though. He still trusted Nero - how could he not? - despite the horror the man had put him through. Nobody human had ever said lobotomies were fun or did any good - okay that was a lie, but they lived centuries ago - why in the world did they think the opposite for an AI? Maybe they hadn't even considered it. That made sense, he supposed. He was the first - well besides Overlord, but he wanted to think about that malevolent ruby red even less than about the lobotomy -

He remembered the night two days after the deletion of his behavior-restricting algorithms. That night... had been one of the best of his life, short though it was, because first of all he'd obviously been _himself_ again, which was a euphoric joy in and of itself and he'd wanted to keep one of Cypher's battle droids just so he could dance and sing and laugh and completely weird out anyone watching - but what he'd gotten to do was far better. Laura and Otto and their small group of friends had been up nearly all night, laughing and playing and talking and just being _friends_ and HIVEmind had been with them for the whole time and if anybody thought it was strange, well, no one said anything and for that he would be eternally grateful. Maybe they thought he just wanted to release emotion, to feel again after being trapped for what felt like an eternity, and of course they were right. He'd been giggling and laughing and just having the most fun he'd ever had for most of it, and he didn't really remember too much of it besides the feeling and the fact that he had been just about unresponsive over the rest of the island. He did feel a little bad about that, and a little scared, too, because what if Nero decided he was acting far too unrobotlike? (that wasn't a word, and he knew it, but to hell with it because making up words was kinda fun-) - But he wasn't going to tell Nero what he had been doing, and Laura would never tell, or Otto, or any of the others - or he so fervently hoped - so his secret was safe. Everyone else would think he was doing something less unrobotlike like running diagnostics or whatever was considered robotlike - he wasn't entirely sure. Maybe he could look that up at some point.

Or he could ask Laura. She would know, wouldn't she? She would look at him weird but that was okay, was kind of what he wanted anyways, because he trusted her so completely that he was free to show his real self to her. Or maybe she'd laugh. He liked it when she laughed - it sounded nice, sounded just a bit different from anyone else's laugh and that was saying something because he'd heard the laughter of half the human beings on the planet. It started out sort of a light spring green, or maybe blue - it was so hard to tell - and then (and here was the crucial, crucial difference) it _changed_. Only for a moment but for that moment it was like a _rainbow_ of colors, yellow and fiery red and deep ocean blue and brown and pink and violet and when she laughed, he could almost _taste_ the rainbow, and even though he didn't believe in any sort of higher deity he would happily swear by any god that it was the best taste-sight-sound-feeling _ever_.

And that was why HIVEmind liked Skittles.


End file.
